Designer and developer Frank Lanza announced the launch of an online version of his witty game “Hey robot”. Together with his wife, son, daughter-in-law and a handful of employees, they made a free universal version for everyone who is under quarantine. It is still full of flaws and mistakes, but it makes the gameplay more “lively and interesting.”
The original Hey Robot project kicked off on Kickstarter in October 2019. As conceived by Lanz, this is a full-fledged board game using popular voice assistants, including Alexa, Siri and Google Assistant. The project is already being successfully implemented, but the game has not yet been put on sale, partly due to global problems with production and logistics. It is expected that it will be released by the summer, but for now you can try out the digital version. For the Lanz team, this is even beneficial, as an extraordinary mass testing of the program.
The idea of “Hey Robot” is extremely simple – you need to ensure that the voice assistant speaks the word you made in a limited number of moves. He can be asked questions, hinted, prompted, just like when playing with ordinary people. The problem (it is the most interesting factor in this game) is that these digital assistants are far from being as “smart” as their creators would like. And when it comes to practice and lively dialogue, an impromptu comedy show begins.
Neither the author of “Hey Robot” nor the creators of these AI know how to communicate with voice assistants, which game strategy to choose. Too many factors are combined here, and the use of intuition and a broad outlook come to the fore rather than the ability to recognize the interlocutor’s speech and maintain a conversation. And modern voice assistants by intuition, for obvious reasons, do not have.
